Building the Renewable Beast

We own "renewable"

2008-05-23T10:09:29Z

We own "renewable". Well, not the concept, but the word. Sort of.

I read an article in Wired magazine about a couple of college students in Ireland who built a website to sell all the words in the dictionary, at $1 per letter. Buying a word lets you "redefine" it by linking it to the site of your choice.

Now that may sound like a silly idea to you, but off-the-wall entrepreneurial business models like this intrigue me. Particularly their application to social ventures. Enough so that I plunked down my $9 each to buy RENEWABLE and BIODIESEL point them to the Biodiesel University website. You can see for yourself at www.thebigwordproject.com.

As of this writing, "our" words are two of almost 4000 that have been bought up so far. These guys may be on to something...

What do you think?

Global biodiesel travelers stop in

2008-06-18T13:00:53Z

The Biodiesel Adventure team from Japan is driving around the world in a stock diesel Toyota Landcruiser. They have built a beautiful biodiesel processing unit into the cargo area of the SUV. They stop at restaurants and schools to collect waste vegetable oil, convert it into biodiesel, then move on. Their mission is to demonstrate sustainability and spur discussion. These guys are educating, exploring and meeting people wherever they go, and it's a very cool thing.

So far they have driven over 8000 miles and used no petroleum diesel at all, and have made almost all of the biodiesel themselves. Shusei Yamada, Tatsuya Ito and Satori Murata, came through the Washington, DC area on Earth Day on the final days of the U.S. leg of their journey.

I arranged for them to do a presentation at Sandy Spring Friends School (which met with much excitement from the students) and through my friend Julie Gabrielli, another school presentation at Roland Park Country School in Baltimore. Local news coverage of their visit is here. We also put them up for a couple of days in my father's home where they had some much-needed R&R.

I finally got to meet them in person yesterday in a Quiznos parking lot near the Baltimore Washington International Airport. I was flying back from speaking at Jane Goodall's Global Youth Summit in Orlando and they were on their way to drop off the Landcruiser at the Port of Baltimore so it could be shipped to Europe for the next leg. We had only an hour together, but it was clear that we were kindred spirits. A video of our encounter is here.

In an email update to the tour's supporters today, Satori writes "We keep telling people that our car runs on biodiesel, but your passion and hearts are our real fuel."

I hope our paths cross again soon.

Jane Goodall's Global Youth Summit

2008-05-23T10:35:53Z

Well, I'm just back from an amazing trip to Florida. I was speaking at the Jane Goodall Institute's Global Youth Summit, which brought together 100 truly outstanding youth leaders from 28 countries. These college and high-school aged leaders and activists are working on wildlife conservation, environmental protection, poverty and water issues in their home countries, and came together to learn new skills and best practices for becoming even more effective change agents.

I was delighted to be invited to speak at such a special event, and the experience was far better than I could have imagined.

To begin with, these youth leaders are a stunningly smart, clear-headed, focused, and accomplished bunch. They have built schools in places where there were no schools. Envisioned animal welfare programs - and then implemented them. Raised money for conservation. For Darfur. Spoken in front of the U.N. Been named ABC Person of the Week. Appeared on Animal Planet. And on and on.

Being around them was like watching Coming Attractions for what you know is going to be a fantastic show. These are the people who really are going to make the world a better place. And they've started already.

Then there was Jane Goodall herself.

Most people recognize Jane Goodall's name and associate it with the tremendously important work with chimpanzees she did for decades in Africa - work that forever changed man's perception of primates and their similarities to humans. Her books and films have been enjoyed by millions. Through absolutely tireless effort over many years she has expanded her sphere of interests and influence to include the overlapping domains of conservation of wildlife, animal rights, protection of ecosystems, reduction of poverty, availability of clean water, and promotion of peace.

Through all her work in all those areas, she has woven a significant thread of youth activism. Her wonderful Roots & Shoots program engages children and adults in all these activities, and more, around a gardening paradigm. She is a trusted advisor to leaders of nations, and a Dame Commander of the British Empire. To my mind, Jane now resides at the top of the pantheon of living environmentalists and naturalists.

As if that wasn't enough, Jane is an amazing person to be around. Her passionate desire to save people, places and animals is infectious, and she possesses an intensely powerful blend of centered calm and focused drive I have never encountered before.

I'm not exaggerating when I say Jane is tireless. At 74 years old, she travels world-wide 300 days a year. One of her staff told me she averages a mere three hours of sleep a night.

My seven year old daughter, whose bedroom contains an array of stuffed chimps, chimp posters, and other primate paraphernalia, has been actively idolizing Dr. Jane for almost two years now, ever since my wife brought home some books featuring Jane. For my daughter to get to meet her hero, have dinner with her, play on the beach with her...it was a wildly exciting time. And a rare gift for a father to be able to give.

It was no less exciting for me. I had a 90 minute speaking slot following Jane's kickoff of the event. One of my rules for public speaking is "If you can help it, avoid following a speaker better than you are". So much for that.

Jane is an absolutely world-class speaker who delivers truly inspirational content supremely straight from the heart. As a lifelong student of the art of presentation, I was deeply impressed with her talent. And much to my surprise and delight, following such a pro helped me give what felt like my best presentation ever. Later, when we had some time alone and I complimented her on her remarkable ability, she said simply and without a speck of ego, "It's a gift." And the way she said it made it clear she meant, "It's a tool I was given to help do this important work".

My talk covered two topics: "Social Entrepreneurship - A Mindset and Lifestyle for Becoming Who You Want to Be and Changing the World" and "Biodiesel University", the latter providing an example of a social venture designed and executed with an entrepreneurial mindset. Apparently, I didn't put anyone to sleep, which was a great relief.

To tell the truth, before I had met Jane, I was surprised by the invitation. She was one of the first to speak out about the dangers of unsustainably produced biofuels and the issues of deforestation, water use, and chemical runoff. I imagined she might not be comfortable having me speak at the conference, because some people hear the Biodiesel University name and infer that we're focused on teaching people in the biodiesel industry better production techniques and mindlessly pushing proliferation. Thankfully, she understood that we're about growing renewable energy knowledge and environmental sustainability mindsets.

She was so very right when she signed one of her books for me, "Together we make a difference".

MSNBC picked up the story here.

Seed-cycle rolls out

2008-05-09T17:28:27Z

We just finished designing and building our first bicycle-powered oil seed press on Thursday and “rolled” it out at Earth Stewardship Day at Sandy Spring Friends School, where kids pedaled for oil from the sunflower seeds they grew in our Energy Garden.

The oil will be made into biodiesel for their school buses, the glycerol (the waste product of the biodiesel production process) will be made into organic soap for the kids to sell, and the sunflower meal will be fed to chickens and sheep. We’ve already made biodiesel from waste restaurant grease for a year and a half to power the school’s 15 bus school bus fleet. We also made organic soap from that glycerol and sold $450 worth in one day at a Friends School holiday event.

The students who have been working in the Energy Garden since last summer were wildly excited to finally see the oil they’ve been hearing and thinking about for so long. We didn’t make much, but as we tweak the press and get used to its personality, we’ll start to get a better and better yield. Several kids suggested building more Seed Cycles and having competitions to see who can pedal out the most oil. The great workout you get is a big bonus, and there was talk of Physical Education credits!

This is a wonderful sustainability education program where students learn through hands-on experience how much time, effort and water it takes to grown their own energy. They enjoy an interaction with nature and gardening, engage in an entrepreneurial effort to create valuable products, and end up thinking about issues of food versus fuel, energy conservation and consumerism, the global politics of oil, and other vital sustainability concepts.

More photos of the event are here.

World's first "dark" algae -powered truck

2008-06-04T07:29:30Z

Yesterday was an exciting day for Biodiesel University. We procured a 2008 Ford F-450 pickup truck (it’s huge), and tanked it up with 100% biodiesel made from algae. This was very special stuff made from microalgae in the absence of light (that’s non-photosynthetic for you technical folks). So special, in fact, that our truck was the first and only truck in the world running on it.

The day was even more special because we drove Jim Woolsey and Jonathan Wolfson to the 2008 Worldwide Energy Conference in the truck to demonstrate the fuel for Department of Defense energy folks. Jim is the former Director of the CIA and former Under Secretary of the Navy, and an icon in the renewable energy and national security arenas. (I let Jim drive the last two blocks). Jonathan is the CEO of Solazyme, the company that has perfected this type of algal biodiesel.

Algal biodiesel holds tremendous promise for reducing greenhouse gases and improving national security by reducing our use of foreign oil, without consuming large tracts of land or displacing food crops.

The McNeal–Lehrer News Hour filmed the truck demonstration for airing sometime soon. Coverage of the event from Forbes is here; a short video with Solazyme CEO Jonathan Wolfson discussing their technology and the importance of the Biodiesel University mission, filmed by Ken Burns' cinematographer Allen Moore, is here.

Lucky to be an Entre-what?

2008-05-09T17:35:40Z

I consider myself a very lucky guy, and for many reasons.

One of them is that I get to share my deep, lifelong passion for the topic of entrepreneurship and all it's varied elements (the mindset, the strategies, the challenges, the pursuit, the ups and downs) with others who also care about it or are interested in learning about it. One of the places I get to do this is the renowned Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, where I've been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for some years now.

"What exactly does an Entrepreneur-in-Residence do?", is a question I hear a lot. I and my fellow EiR's get to do fun stuff like work with students starting their first businesses, coach early stage companies from across the Mid Atlantic region in strategy development and on preparing for presentations to potential investors, judge business plan competitions in Maryland and China, co-teach undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship classes, sit on various conference panels, and occasionally act as lab rats for entrepreneurship researchers.

I also get to oversee our Board Fellows program, where we match MBA candidates with non-profit boards for mutually beneficial pro-bono consulting engagements. And because I've been involved in so many startups, I get to dream up experiential learning opportunities for entrepreneurship students. That's where you, as a student, instead of reading about startups, get your hands dirty in a startup environment and see how bootstrapping a venture looks up close - from conception, through planning, to execution - by working inside one.

Sometime in late 2005 it started to dawn on me that we were doing a great job at the biz school teaching the skills that would prepare students to go out and make lots of money for the companies they worked for, and in the case of entrepreneurship students, for themselves, but we were doing very little to prepare them to go out and make the world a better place. Yet the skills are identical.

So now you know part of the story of how Biodiesel University came to exist: as a hands-on, experiential learning opportunity in social entrepreneurship for business school students. Of course, it very quickly grew beyond that to include students from many other disciplines, and shortly thereafter to include other institutions of higher education. But it's still housed within the business school and being "incubated" at the Dingman Center.

Besides getting to hang around with lots of smart people who care about entrepreneurship, there is also the occasional perk to be enjoyed. Now I'm not anybody's idea of a sports fan, but a few weeks ago my son and I were able to take in a Maryland Terrapins basketball game from a lovely VIP suite at Comcast Stadium belonging to the business school. One bumps into some fascinating people at Smith School functions, and I was having a wonderful chat about sustainable farming with a very warm and down-to-earth fellow named Roger Frock. Turns out Roger was a co-founder and president of Federal Express, who now spends his time writing (Changing How the World Does Business), lecturing at business schools and traveling around helping his wife Linda in her work in alternative healing. Roger's book provides an insider's view of one of the great startup success stories of modern times.

We were joined in conversation by Sharon McLoone from the Washington Post. She was intrigued when the discussion turned to Biodiesel University and wrote a great article about our program in the paper's Small Business blog.

A fun event with my son. Great conversation with business titans. Good press on my favorite project. How's that for a lucky day?

Sustainability Rising

2008-05-09T17:54:51Z

Biodiesel University's Director of Education Megean Garvin, our Senior Advisor Steve Boyd and I have just returned from the National Biodiesel Conference in Orlando. We were there to keep up-to-date with the industry and to meet industry players, potential partners and sponsors.

Two obvious trends at the conference were noteworthy: One is that rising feedstock prices have put tremendous fear in the hearts of investors and producers, and the other is that sustainability has finally come into its own as an industry focus.

The rising cost of the agricultural products traditionally used to make biodiesel, coupled with sharp attention on the food versus fuel issue, have shifted the industry's hopes onto algae and waste streams as the feedstocks of the future. The hope is that these alternatives will become commercially viable quickly enough to avoid real disruption in the growth of the industry, which has seen a doubling to tripling of production for the last several years.

Sustainability was a constant refrain at the conference; people were discussing the sustainability of feedstocks themselves, the sustainability of biodiesel production processes, the sustainability of logistics that move feedstocks and finished fuel across great distances. The entire convention gave a long standing ovation when the chairman of the National Biodiesel Board (the industry's trade association) announced the formation of an official sustainability committee at the top level of the Board's structure.

We also got to spend a little time with actress and environmentalist Daryl Hannah, an avid biodieseler and co-founder of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, talking about the great traction sustainability is finally experiencing within the industry.

Check out Daryl's great website and videos about her biodiesel and sustainability efforts.

Jay Leno's amazing full-custom GM-built 650HP biodiesel-powered jet supercar was on display at the conference. Here's a video from Popular Mechanics on the car's unveiling. (One correction, Jay: Biodiesel isn't made in any significant quantity from corn oil - it's way too expensive.)

As a technogeek myself, I love this concept car. It's fun, sexy, and eye-catching. From a societal and environmental sustainability perspective, I'm concerned that the message this and other big, high-horsepower renewable fuel vehicles (for example, Hummers running on a biodiesel and hydrogen blend) send to the public is "Hey, drive as big a car as you want - renewable fuel technology will make it OK." But it's not OK. Burning anything creates emissions we'd be a lot better off without, and burning them flagrantly and unnecessarily in oversized personal vehicles is woefully short sighted.

People like Armory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute, and many others, who are rethinking the personal transportation paradigm and designing smaller, lighter vehicles are headed in the right direction. Driving smaller and driving less is where we need to start.

The mantra of sustainable renewable energy is "The cheapest and cleanest energy is the energy you don't use".

Validation

2008-05-09T17:36:57Z

I often counsel start-ups, particularly technology start-ups, never to go very far down the product development path without involving your end-users. They are the ones who "feel the pain" - who know what the problems are and what's not working in the field - and (generally) have a much better handle on what features and functions will be valuable to them and which are just fluff, or worse.

Often, what you think you know about the problem you're developing a solution for is incomplete or irrelevant. Sometimes, it's simply wrong. Without end-user validation, your new venture can be walking in the minefield.

Biodiesel University's Director of Education Megean Garvin and I held two teacher focus groups this week; one for middle school science teachers and one for high school science teachers.

We had teachers from Washington, D.C., Delaware, and several counties around Maryland. Megean and I described Biodiesel University's development plans and specific components for our mobile laboratories, our curriculum and our online content. The teachers provided great feedback on what would be most useful to them and on how they would ideally like to see our school visits structured.

We were gratified by the strong interest the teachers expressed in having our program come into their schools (the response from some could easily be described as "passionate"). They told us that students are excited about renewable energy topics and hungry for experiences with real equipment. They also educated us on the difficulty they have in fitting all the science material students are required to learn into the school year. They further affirmed for us that the "curriculum bridge" approach Megean has developed, where in-class modules tie together the hands-on experiences on our mobile labs with the topics required by the state science standards, will be the way to go. And there was a recurring theme of the value of our program to teachers and students in academic areas outside of science.

We learned a lot, we were re-energized to keep plowing ahead, and we grew some great evangelists. And as hard as we looked, we didn't uncover any land mines.